Strange and Obscure Stories of the Civil War

by Tim Rowland

  As Sickles’s men grandly reformed their lines further toward enemy territory, it was hard for a novice not to be impressed with the show of waving flags and beating drums and the glint of polished brass and steel. But real military men knew what would happen. Winfield Hancock stonily watched the soldiers push into no-man’s-land before dryly remarking, “They’ll be back.” And so they were. At a much faster rate than they had been dispatched. Anyone who was anywhere near Dan Sickles at that point in time was about to pay an awful price.

  Technically, Sickles had a point in thinking that better, slightly higher ground was to be had ahead of the main line. But the bigger the bubble the thinner the gum, and Sickles’s salient popped in several places, with gaps that the Rebels could easily exploit.

  Confederate Gen. James Longstreet attacked with ferocity, cutting down Union soldiers “like blades of grass before the scythe,” as they said after just about every battle back then, and eventually driving them from positions that are now classically known in Gettysburg history as the Peach Orchard and the Wheatfield. There is a line of thinking—certainly Sickles himself perpetuated it—that the rogue general’s blunder was fortuitous for the North in the sense that Lee’s troops spent a terrible amount of energy capturing a position that turned out not to be all that valuable, and in the process the Confederate commander was forced into a series of unfortunate moves, culminating with Pickett’s disastrous charge into the Yankee center. Sickles would also claim for the rest of his life that his pushing of the envelope forced Meade to engage the enemy rather than retreat. So any fool could see that the real hero of Gettysburg was one Daniel Sickles.

  Luckily, more or less, for Sickles, the Confederates weren’t having their best day either, tactically speaking. But all that meant is that the rout didn’t happen quite as soon as it probably should have. Again, much of Sickles’s corps fought well for a while, but even the Spartans at Thermopylae couldn’t have overcome the bad position they had been placed in by their commander. Their ranks shredded, the Federals made their way to the rear with considerable interest, to the area where Sickles was headquartered. Discretion being the better part of valor, the general was on his way out too, when a bounding Rebel cannonball pulverized his right leg. History almost lost Dan Sickles at that point, but even this episode worked out largely in his favor.

  One, the catastrophic injury might have saved him from a court martial for insubordination. And although there’s little that’s romantic about losing a leg, Sickles’s exit from the

  battlefield in a horse-drawn ambulance only added to his lore.

  “ … [T]he loss of one of his legs in battle helped keep the heroic side of his character in the public mind,” states his obit in the New York Times. And at some point, someone jammed a lit cigar between his lips, giving the impression that the grievously wounded general was calm, cool, and collected (drugged to the gills might have been more like it) even in the face of such a momentous calamity. There’s a chance, a fairly good chance even, that this never happened. But someone said it did, and the story was off to the races. Sickles himself related the story of course, but only after he had been told about it by someone who claimed to have “been there.”

  Dan Sickles, seated, obviously, never fought again after losing a leg at Gettysburg, although the wound in some ways was really the beginning of his military career. Mark Twain remarked that Sickles seemed to value the missing leg over the one he had left. (Courtesy National Archives)

  For the remainder of his life, Sickles made hay out of his missing leg, which, Mark Twain observed, he appeared to value above the one he had left. For Sickles, said Hessler, it wasn’t an amputation as much as it was a “career move.” The catastrophic injury gave Sickles street cred with veterans, particularly among his embattled 3rd Corps, most of which would have followed him through hell.

  Finally, the wound gave the naughty general one last advantage. Sickles was transported back to Washington to recuperate, and because of this he got to tell his version of the battle to Lincoln before Meade filed his official report. The president visited a recuperating Sickles, and while their conversation is unrecorded, there is little in Sickles’s life to suggest that he would be a man to downplay his own heroism while giving due credit to those who actually deserved it.

  Lincoln and Sickles, Honest Abe and Dishonest Dan, were a curious pair. At the outbreak of the war, Lincoln the Republican needed, politically speaking, all the pro-war, pro-Union Democrats he could get his hands on, and in this regard Sickles was a perfect fit. This also explained his rapid rise to the position of general, despite his paucity of military experience. Sickles, whose greatest asset was the sensitivity of his political antenna, knew Lincoln needed him and played on his relative value to the point where he would become something of a fixture at White House dinners—where he was not shy about telling all present that it was he who had pulled victory at Gettysburg out of the defeated jaws of Meade. The president, it appears, listened politely but didn’t buy a word of it. Once his wound had healed, Sickles begged Lincoln to return him to command of his beloved 3rd Corps, but the president always seemed to have some other, “more important” errand for Sickles to run, which usually involved sending Sickles to lands foreign and domestic that kept hundreds if not thousands of miles between Dan Sickles and any chance to order more men to slaughter. At war’s end, Sickles found himself tasked to South America.

  In between these sojourns, Sickles pounded away at his lifelong theme: He had been right, Meade had been wrong. He appeared before Congress and told Meade’s enemies (Republicans distrusted the degree to which the hearts of West Pointers such as Meade were in the fight) what they wanted to hear. When cornered by the facts, Sickles’s version of the “truth” would pop up somewhere else, usually parroted by his lackeys, but sometimes in more original formats with results that were equal parts hilarious and pathetic.

  At one of his lower points on the credibility scale, a mysterious and anonymous scribe who dubbed himself “Historicus” began writing for a New York City paper on the grounds that he was an eyewitness to the Battle of Gettysburg and needed to clear the air about what had transpired on the second day of the battle, lest history be forever deceived. Historicus’s story was a carbon of Sickles’s, with a few surplus laurels thrown in that the general might have been too shy to award himself up front, had he been signing his own name to the piece.

  With the cessation of hostilities, Sickles got back to his role as America’s scoundrel laureate, chasing women and civil service appointments with equal relish. He was appointed to head up the South Carolina district during Reconstruction and almost wound up rekindling the war. But this only won him a bigger and better assignment as ambassador of Spain in 1869, where he catted around in the royal court, took up with deposed queen Isabella II, and wound up marrying the daughter of a Spanish Councillor of State, with whom he had two children before washing his hands of the lot of them and jumping ship back to New York. If he hadn’t exactly started the Spanish-American War, his appalling Ugly American manners and obsession with Cuba at least laid a plausible foundation.

  Once home, Dan Sickles quickly got back to the never-ending task of promoting Dan Sickles. This was important, since the grownups in the military were always bad-mouthing his performance at Gettysburg and Sickles felt the need to try to stay one step ahead. He was good at it, getting himself appointed to the New York Monument Commission—he wanted nothing so much as a statue to himself at Gettysburg—as well as sitting in on veterans groups and anniversary celebrations. These were the perfect platforms for perpetuating his story, and his audiences of veterans were always more than ready to offer him a hero’s welcome (even if the books of the organizations that Sickles directed usually reflected, sooner or later, large chunks of missing cash). An aging Sickles would always show up late, and make a show of dragging himself—missing leg at the fore—down the main aisle to the stage where he was to speak. Nor did he mind being at the center of attention,
even when he wasn’t. Once, at the funeral of a fellow officer, Sickles settled himself at a point in the viewing room where he was sure to draw more attention than the corpse.

  This life of charades and lies tinged with perpetual scandal could only lead to one thing: Sickles was reelected to Congress, where, to his credit, he introduced legislation that established the Gettysburg National Battlefield and championed its (and his, of course) place in history.

  A favored line of Sickles’s was that he had never before spoken about the events of Gettysburg, but attacks on his honor made it necessary now. In the end, however, Sickles spoke “for the first time” about Gettysburg so many times that he overplayed his hand. That afternoon in early July so many years ago began to define and dominate his existence. A random question on an unrelated topic could somehow be twisted by Sickles into an avenue for defending his behavior at Gettysburg while attacking Meade’s.

  Mark Twain’s experience with Sickles had been typical, although Twain was better armed than most to put the experience into words. As fate would have it, Twain wound up living across the street from Sickles in New York, but the two famous men never visited (“he is too old, I am too lazy,” Twain explained) until an acquaintance of both virtually dragged the great writer across the street. Twain endured what he could of Sickles’s “monotonous talk—it was about himself, is always about himself.” Yet Twain seemed bemused in a melancholy sort of way by the old man, whom he called “winningly childlike.”

  Dan Sickles, documented murderer, liar, thief, cheater, philanderer, two-timer, and insubordinate, lived long enough to witness in person the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. No other corps commander on either side held out that long. Sickles almost had to in the cosmic scheme of things, although this milestone came with a price. Well into his nineties, his body and mind were shot. Once a wealthy man, he was now a pauper and only escaped arrest for his debts thanks to the charity of his estranged family. He was dead within a year of the reunion, and he went to his grave with the bitter knowledge that—despite his best attempts to spin history in his favor—no statue of himself stared out onto the scene of his most famous act. Yet for a couple of days in July, 1913, Sickles was once again surrounded by the men he cherished, the men of the 3rd Corps whose record, like Sickles’s, had become the subject of so much derision. One last time they joined together in laughter and tears and hugs and stories, lubricated with copious quantities of liquor. Sickles’s mind came and went, but he knew he was among friends; he knew he was a great leader of men, and he knew that he was loved.

  At Gettysburg today, there is a grand monument out in the fields, near the site of the 3rd Corps’s encounter with Longstreet, a monument that is a tribute to Sickles’s New York Excelsior Brigade. But something, on examination, is obviously missing. Five columns encircle a pedestal, but the pedestal is empty. The explanation of this situation isn’t historically solid, but it’s good. At one time a bust of Dan Sickles was supposedly to have been proudly placed at the monument’s center, a reminder to future generations of the general’s important service to his country. When it came time to hire a sculptor to chisel the statue, however, the members of the New York Monument Commission were shocked to discover that there was no money left in the agency’s accounts to pay for the project. The money for the statue of Dan Sickles had been stolen—by former monument committee chairman Dan Sickles.

  CHAPTER 13

  Spare Time

  War was hell, but it had its moments. Robert E. Lee famously commented that it was a good thing war was so bloody, otherwise it would be too much fun. Frequent are the descriptions of idle brigades during battle whose soldiers were agitating to get into the fray. At Appomattox, Maj. Gen. Joshua Chamberlain reported that dedicated scrapper Phil Sheridan seemed rather gloomy over Lee’s surrender. After the truce had been declared, gunfire erupted on a far flank. Sheridan was about to send an urgent message to his men to cease the slaughter when he was overcome by nostalgia. “Aw hell,” he said, reconsidering. “Let’em fight.”

  For the boys, war was at first a new experience. But then, just about anything that didn’t involve plowing fields and pulling stumps would have been a new experience. Some had never shot a gun, nor had they traveled more than a few miles beyond their own property. More than a few had never seen a naked lady. Many men would die needlessly because the raw recruits didn’t have the faintest clue how to cook a pot of beans.

  All of that was about to change.

  And while war might have been hell, the alternative was frequently worse. To the question of what the men did in their spare time, the answer is a grisly surprise: They died. By the hundreds of thousands, they died. Incredible as it might seem, fighting was statistically much safer than sitting around in a cold, wet camp or foul prison with nothing to drink but a muddy swill of water and urine. As unconscionably bloody as Civil War battlefields could be, soldiers faced only a little better (or worse) than one chance in ten of being hit. (Don’t tell this, however, to the 26th North Carolina, which lost 588 of 800 men on the first day of Gettysburg; after a day of rest, those who escaped unharmed or weren’t hurt too badly were ordered to the center of the battlefield and told to report to a man by the name of Pickett.)

  The Union lost 110,000 men to battlefield deaths; more than twice that number died of disease or accidents. The South lost 94,000 in battle, but 164,000 died of other causes. Some of those “other causes” included colorful episodes of drownings, equipment malfunction, and even murder. The Union lost 300 men to sunstroke and 400 to suicide. But most fatalities were caused by disease, treated, more often than not, with medieval concoctions such as mercury that only made things worse.

  In the dead of winter, 1861–62—months before the South’s first major foray into Maryland—Stonewall Jackson was itching to invade the border state with a small force based in what is now Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. Across the Potomac River in the town of Hancock was an even smaller Federal force determined to offer what resistance it could. As John H. Nelson conveys in his meticulously researched booklet Bombard and Be Damned, nothing much happened here, militarily speaking. Jackson’s emissary crossed the river to demand Hancock’s surrender under pain of being shelled. An apathetic Union commander told him to feel free to begin the bombardment whenever he wished, since most of the people in town were Southern sympathizers anyway.

  Outside of a few shells lobbed back and forth, the B&O railroad and a couple of churches took the worst of it. But a lot happened at Hancock in terms of understanding the threats faced by soldiers in camp. While battlefield casualties were scarce, disease was a more frequent visitor. Included in Nelson’s notes is a list of men who died, and the cause of death. An abridged survey would include: Frank Vananken, typhoid; Elijah Leggett, typhoid; Horace Lane, typhoid; James Barrett, drowned while on guard duty; Amos Wenrich, drowned after slipping on the ice when he was crossing the C&O canal to get a cup of coffee; Owen Bullard, gastritis; Andrew Ward, measles; Joseph Austin, chronic diarrhea; Franklin Ward, typhoid; Amos Thompson, accidentally shot; George Collins, exposure; Henry Reid, malignant sore throat; and so on.

  Camp conditions were far more worrisome to the soldiers than the enemy, wrote the 19th New York regimental historian: “The mortality in the 19th at this place was great. The village was one execrable mudhole, and what with fatigue and picket duties, colds and fevers began to abound. The unconquerable disposition of the soldiers to shut themselves up close in their quarters without ventilation made the evil a hundredfold worse.” Sensing that fresh air would help, doctors knocked out windows to “purify the air,” but the freezing soldiers patched them up as soon as the physician left. Fires helped take the edge off the chill, but weren’t always allowed because they could give away a regiment’s position. That was a bad proposition during an Arctic snap in which the Potomac froze six inches deep in a single night and the temperature dipped to 16 below. On the evening of Hancock’s bombardment, both sides were literally shooting
in the dark, until Jackson called it off at 10 PM. War in these conditions, reported Confederate gunner George Neese, just wasn’t any fun:

  The snow is four inches deep and the night is very unfavorable for an outdoor performance; and to add to the disagreeableness of the situation, an icy breeze is creeping over the frozen hills and feels like a breath from the North Pole. At last about two hours after midnight, an order came around permitting us to make fires, and I never saw fences disappear so fast.

  Snow wasn’t always the worst element soldiers faced. That honor would probably go to mud. Spring thaws and rains made for some of the most miserable conditions an army could (or couldn’t) travel through. Despite some early stabs at macadam on the National Pike in Maryland and elsewhere, most rural roads were unpaved and barely improved. That could be inconvenient enough for one horse or wagon, but men and horses by the tens of thousands pulling ton after ton of cannon and supplies turned dirt pathways into murderous ribbons of muck that seemed to suck boot, wagon wheel, and hoof toward the center of the earth. On their way to Berkeley Springs, Jackson’s men had settled uncomfortably at a place called Unger that was known to the soldiers as “Camp Mud.”

  Simple jaunts could turn into arduous, day-long treks. In battle, needed guns frequently were not forthcoming because they were paralyzed by goo; there were times when mud affected the outcome of a scrap more than the soldiers did. And sometimes mud prevented the battle from beginning at all. That happened in January of 1863, when the hapless Union Gen. Ambrose Burnside boldly determined that he would atone for his failure at Antietam; that he would atone for his failure at Fredericksburg; that he would atone for—well, atone for just about every military action he’d been involved in up to that point.